My wife and I went to hear Seal perform tonight. I say ‘hear’ because we didn’t actually pay to go inside. We brought a blanket and sat on the grass outside the amphi’s fence.

It’s not because I’m cheap. It’s more to do with the principle of the thing. I just don’t think Seal justifies the exorbitant prices they were asking for tickets.

Reading that back I realize that it’s exactly what someone who was cheap would say. Is this what they call an ‘epiphany’? Am I actually cheap? All those times I didn’t do things on principle, was I just being stingy?

OK, that may all be true. It may be that I’m just plain mean. But seriously… Seal? He’s got three songs. Three. And he played them all tonight. “Killer”, “Kiss From A Rose” and “Crazy”. They sounded pretty good, but that was it. After “Killer” it was nearly all filler.

How the concert might have looked from the inside

The highlight of the evening was when Seal handed the mic to someone in the audience. They asked him to sing a song called If It’s In My Mind, It’s On My Face. Seal hesitated saying he couldn’t remember all the words and that he and the band never really performed that song, but he got his guitarist to bash out a few chords and he gave it his best shot. After an unrehearsed verse and chorus, Seal asked the fan how he had done.

Based on the cheeky chap’s response, ‘egg’ must have been in Seal’s mind because that’s exactly what was on his face.

I may be cheap, but at least I didn’t ask Seal to sing me a song and then complain that his performance was only “kacha kacha”.